


Tastes Better When You Don't Think You Need It

by madeinessos



Category: Ocean's 8 (2018)
Genre: Extramarital Affairs, F/F, Infidelity, Light BDSM, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2020-11-23 20:44:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20895839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madeinessos/pseuds/madeinessos
Summary: What she had with Tammy were all the parts in a relationship that she cared to bother with: thick layers of cream and fruit, the pulp sucked clean and the rind cast off.





	Tastes Better When You Don't Think You Need It

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SadieFlood](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SadieFlood/gifts).

> Title from Tinashe's "Thug Cry."

Daphne liked to take her time.

She also liked to think that she knew what she wanted.

Sometimes she thought of how both of these had used to only mean the sheer thrill of slipping her hand into an expressly forbidden cookie jar. Three cookies only for today, Daphne. Three. Cookies. Only. Then the lid screwed tight. The red ribbon looped around the jar drooping. The pile of chocolate ginger cookies looking so sad. Begging to be eaten. Eat us, Daphne. Nobody would find out, isn’t that exciting? It motherfucking is. Eat us, baby. Daphne loved chocolate ginger cookies. And she had always wanted more than what was allowed. So she would slip in her hand – but only after waiting for the exact slice of a moment when she wouldn’t be caught. Then she would proceed to take her time, savouring every crumb caught on her palm, luxuriating in every roll of flavour on her tongue. For some reason the pilfered cookies had always been tastier.

Well, fuck.

Now she was even more hungry.

Now, too, she was enjoying Tammy like this.

Nosing at the perfumed spot of skin behind Tammy’s ear, Daphne brushed a knuckle over Tammy’s shoulder blades, languidly, left to right, right to left, languidly. Daphne hummed. A musky rosy scent. Naked skin glowing from a bath. Wave upon wave upon wave of submerged shudders.

Daphne smiled. She uncapped her own perfume bottle. Thick shapely glass, pussy pink. Her own name in curling gold letters. “Another dab,” she told Tammy. “I want you to smell like me.”

It was not a question, but in the mirror Tammy swallowed and said, “Yes.”

“Behind your other ear.”

“Yes.”

“So that I have both ears,” Daphne added with a little laugh.

Then she dragged the rose-gold cap, shaped like a claw, down Tammy’s spine.

All the shifting and the rippling, the arching and the jumping of muscles, all of these she hungrily noted. Daphne never forgot. Especially the little details, the grace notes. When Tammy winced breathily as Daphne dug the claw _just so_ in the middle of the way back up, she almost wished she’d had a camera on hand. She wanted to capture that sharp surprise. She wanted to capture that flinch to get away, swiftly followed by that arch pleading for more. She wanted to capture the way Tammy’s eyes fluttered before darkening. She wanted to capture her other hand snaking around to palm and squeeze Tammy’s breast, twisting her nipple, until it was the same lush shade of dark pink as the pillows on Tammy’s side of the marriage bed. The bed partly visible on the mirror, partly blocked by Daphne on the mirror. And, most of all, Daphne wanted to capture the wet strangled moan, as Tammy’s body realised that it was trapped, front and back, as Tammy twisted back and forth between Daphne’s claw and Daphne’s hand, by turns recoiling and yearning. But she hadn’t got even a recorder right now, and Tammy was averse to being recorded anyway, so Daphne just satisfied herself with her senses and with her memory and with the antique cherrywood vanity mirror across from Tammy’s fucking marriage bed.

“See,” Daphne went on as she dug some more, squeezing out a tight yelp and a whimper, “there’ll be no time to remember which ear is which when I’m pushing you face-first over your patio table.”

Not quite true. Daphne not remembering which of her Tammy’s ear was marked with her very own **_Daphne_** scent? Please. But it was nice to watch Tammy’s reaction in Tammy’s own bedroom mirror. How her eyes glistened. How her naked throat pulsed. How she exhaled, slowly, slowly, through slightly parted lips, before saying, “Yes. Of course.”

Tammy always said yes. She’d never not told Daphne yes. She was very good to Daphne like that.

And so Daphne enjoyed Tammy like this: on the palm of her hand, wrapped up in delicious grace notes, all hers.

*

A year after That Criminally Memorable Met Gala, they met again.

Or, more accurately, Daphne happened to see Tammy between the brightly-lit aisles of Imaan’s Mini Mart in a suburb and, shortly after, was struck with the certainty of her want for Tammy. It was a certainty as firm as Daphne’s other certainties: her job was the best; book clubs were the worst; she wouldn’t enjoy taking care of kids but she would love to spoil them as their Cool Aunt; small shops in anonymous neighbourhoods were the best haunts whenever she was in her Process; she had no regrets dropping out of university; the way her jewel-encrusted bracelets clacked together as she fisted another woman was hotter than all of Hollywood put together; the Penelope Stern line of lipsticks was a goddamned blight on earth.

It was a certainty so certain that Daphne decided that, yeah, she wanted Tammy. And why not?

Yes, Daphne wanted Tammy.

And when Daphne wanted something, she simply must have it.

*

That particular morning she had woken up wanting fruit.

Daphne was huddled in a midnight blue princess coat, her hair hanging about her face, her reading glasses slightly digging into her scrunched up nose as she poked the oranges in Imaan’s Mini Mart, and she was wondering what was it that people looked for when they groped and prodded perfectly fine-looking fruit, when she heard it.

It was a woman’s voice.

A familiar voice.

Daphne cocked her head, fruit groping paused.

The voice brought a rush of impressions and memories. Of gamble, of risk, of success carefully slipped out.

It was the voice which had personally handed Daphne a dripping bunch of fake as fuck diamonds. The voice which had leapt up from a couch in a dingy-chic loft and snapped at Daphne, “Excuse me! You are trespassing.” The voice which had nonstop questions for Daphne, a sort of an unimpressed mini-interrogation, during Daphne’s first meeting with that small group of audaciously enterprising women. But afterwards, when Daphne had told them how she’d slapped and cuffed and edged Ocean’s ex, that familiar voice said, “Oh,” before melting back into the women’s drunken celebratory laughter.

Tammy.

She remembered that the woman’s name was Tammy.

And a year later Daphne was hearing her voice again.

“Thea,” that voice rang out. It was at once strident and worried. Soon it was joined by footsteps, brisk, metronomic. Tac-tac-tac on the mint green tiles. “Thea, answer Mommy!” Tammy’s voice cut through the hum of dozens of voices, the patter of rain outside, the old love song crooning in the speakers.

Calmly, Daphne turned back to her oranges.

She put one in her basket. Then two. Then another.

Somewhere between the aisles to her side Tammy’s voice drew nearer, slanted a little ways away, drew nearer again.

Daphne hummed. Gave an orange a last thoughtful grope. Put two more in her basket.

No need to hurry; before the hour was done she’d have hooked in Tammy, like she had done with almost all the women she wanted, single or otherwise. So. How about these dragonfruit? These look cute. Daphne wanted dragonfruit.

Then Tammy’s voice sounded from behind the aisle closest to Daphne. A slightly breathless stream of words: “Mommy told you to stay put! Why did you run off, why did you do that? We’re leaving, come on, come on.”

The voices, one scolding and one plaintive, were floating to the general direction of the cashier registers.

Daphne pushed her glasses up her nose. Ruffled her hair a bit. Carefree tousle.

With a nonchalant sway of hips, she headed towards the tills too. She tossed a box of cinnamon-flavoured instant coffee in her basket before rounding the last corner –

She stopped short.

Up ahead, Tammy cut an absurdly neat figure.

Daphne let her gaze slide along and cling on to said figure. Red coat, nicely cut. Buttoned right up, even the cuffs. A bit of breathlessness. Brisk determined feet. Abundant hair so neatly parted and so neatly combed.

So neat. So tidy.

And the cookie jar flashed in Daphne’s mind. Eat her, Daphne, the jar seemed to say in melting tones. Daphne could feel her lips stretching into a satisfied smile. Eat her. Pull her apart, crumb by sticky crumb.

Tammy glanced back at her kid, eyes narrowed. From this angle the lights shone clearer on her tightened lips.

Wait.

Good god.

That coral shade – a fucking Penelope Stern lippie.

Christ, what was the world coming to?

There we go, Daphne thought. Start with her lips. The first crumb. Daphne’s thumb and forefinger twitched.

Daphne tilted her head, watching. She would always remember this. A backdrop of wide glass windows misted over by the rain. The overcast morning outside, the too-bright lights inside. Tammy in neat red, her body at once rigid and quietly graceful, briskly pulling out stuff from her grocery basket: broccoli, spinach, onions, garlic, apples, butter, a box of herbal tea, a carton of orange juice, a jar of wheat grass. Her face had smoothened into a neutral sort of pleasantness with the cashier. The corners of her mouth were tucked into a small and neat smile. She glowed with an unobtrusive and neat wholesomeness. Daphne watched the subtle transformation. It was this, along with the way Tammy held her body, that made something sit up even more in Daphne. She was sure she was missing a crucial detail about Tammy.

A few minutes later Daphne found out what.

A light rain was still falling when Daphne stepped out of Imaan’s Mini Mart. Crisp. An apple of a morning; an apple ripe for her teeth. And because it was unusually dark for eleven in the morning, all along the street the shop lights had been turned on. The sign directly across from Imaan’s was small and ivory, announcing a studio for piano, voice, and violin lessons in dark blue letters. Daphne had watched Tammy and her kid dart through the rain, past the parked cars, and past that music studio’s tinted doors.

The rain was falling in silvery wisps which made Daphne remove her glasses.

Then she pocketed it.

Then she crossed the street.

Then Tammy burst out from the tinted doors and charged straight at Daphne.

Details slammed into Daphne. Tammy gripped her arm. It was a grip so strong it was startling. Tammy was steering her away from the studio, almost pulling her, back into the rain. Firm. Brisk. Relentless. Tammy’s eyes were snapping. Her nostrils were flaring. Her hair was slightly fluffed up. Her lips were a tight line. “You,” she ground out.

The breath slightly knocked out of her, Daphne still quipped, “Original.”

Tammy cut her off. “Hell no. No, no, no.”

Even when they had reached the pavement outside Imaan’s, and even when they had kept moving along a bit further past it, and even when they had stopped outside the pastel door of an ice cream shop, Daphne still didn’t disentangle herself from Tammy’s iron grip.

She had been too busy admiring and thinking about Tammy’s iron grip.

Those neat, deceptively delicate hands. And those other things like the weight thrown and put at an advantage, the quick feet. Daphne was struck with the certainty that Tammy was more athletic than she was.

“I saw you in the grocery,” Tammy was saying in low severe tones. “Scoping me. You think you were being subtle? Whatever it is, I don’t do that anymore. That Gala was the last one. I don’t do that anymore, and never approach me when I’m with my family, and don’t ever approach me through my kids. So forget it. Do you understand me? Forget it. Don’t make me repeat myself.”

Daphne raised her brows. “I’ve never met you in my life.”

Tammy blinked.

Tammy drew back a bit, and added, “Oh.”

“Common mistake.” Daphne made a careless wave, her plastic bag of fruit crackling. She still made no effort to move away. “One time I was mistaken for a catnapper – kidnapping a cat – in Tunisia. Long story. Another time someone thought I was trespassing an abandoned-chic apartment. Also a long story.”

“Oh,” repeated Tammy. Her lips twitched. Her gaze flicked down Daphne, then up. Brisk yet measured like her steps. She released Daphne’s arm. “Yeah, I’ve had a long week,” she said.

Daphne put on her glasses. “Don’t worry about it. I’m told I have a criminally angelic face.”

“Really.” Down again. Then up again. “You remind me of that one evil stepsister, actually.”

Ah, her illustrious streak of roles as villains and antagonists. “Which one?”

“Or was it that crazy twin?”

“I’d be a fool to terrorise someone with my perfect face.”

“Or was it that serial killer receptionist?”

“Oh yeah?”

“Or was it that drug boss, the one with the scar?”

“Do I look like someone who’d be hot with a scar?”

Tammy paused too long. A pause swollen with suggestion.

Daphne was grinning.

Tammy was openly regarding Daphne’s face. She was one of the few people who looked Daphne in the eyes and didn’t immediately fail to hold her gaze. And Daphne liked the way Tammy’s mouth was quirked at the corner, the way it made her smile uneven, as though her amusement had spilled over the neatness. Had spilled over that infuriatingly wrong brand of lipstick. Daphne imagined wiping off that lipstick with her thumb.

Finally Tammy said, “Very hot, actually.” Her eyes were gleaming.

Daphne’s thumb and forefinger twitched. She gestured at the door near them, its window an oval of frosted glass. “Do you want ice cream? I’m going to have some. Do you have to be somewhere else?”

“Oh, ice cream’s on me. Since I was the one who assaulted you.”

“I like how you say assaulted.”

Tammy blinked. “Really.”

“The word sounded,” Daphne began, and paused. As if in thought, she licked her lips. “Soaked.” She modulated her voice, curled her tongue around Tammy’s accent. “Assault.”

Tammy blinked again. Then she threw back her head and laughed. “You _are_ ridiculous. Who knew,” she told Daphne with a bit of disbelief, before laughing again.

Daphne liked her laugh, round and full. A laugh from deep in the belly rippling up to her throat.

And she liked how pleased Tammy was to see parfait in the shop menu. She liked how Tammy talked about her daughter’s piano lessons, tone wreathed with pride, and how she talked about recipes for juiced vegetables. “Don’t laugh,” Tammy said, laughing a little herself, “but at least this way veggies can be exciting. I know the trick is to season and spice your greens but I’m clueless when it comes to cooking. I had my thumb bleeding all over some ginger once.”

She liked how Tammy asked her about the fruits in the bag, and how Tammy asked her what she did before directing, before acting, Tammy’s eyes warm with interest all the while, so Daphne told her the truth: “I dropped out of uni. All those regulations, so not for me. I read a rule in a syllabus and it makes me twitch and it makes me want to break it, you know?”

“Not really,” murmured Tammy. Her gaze was roving, clinging on to Daphne’s face.

She also liked how Tammy’s eyes had slid over the ice cream shop as soon as they entered, considering, assessing, but not as openly as she did whilst gazing at Daphne. With the place, the way Tammy’s eyes slanted and darted and settled heavily for a few moments made Daphne think that Tammy lurked a lot.

An athletic lurker.

She watched Tammy sink a long teaspoon into layers of thick cream and chilled fruit and granola, before she remarked, “So is it just printing out diamonds for you, or do you also take yoga or muay thai or whatever?”

Tammy glanced up, her lips uneven with amusement again. “You really don’t know.”

“No,” Daphne said, shrugging. “We all spent a drunken night celebrating. There was dancing, I think?” And then they'd pretended to be strangers in the train the next day.

“I used to hijack trucks.”

“What.”

“I also used to be a fence.”

“You hijacked trucks?”

“From Canada.”

Daphne knew she was grinning again. She realised that they had been murmuring, heads close together. Her thumb and forefinger twitched, so she just turned to her own bowl, her scoops of vanilla and chocolate, and plucked off a cherry. “I still can’t picture it,” she said.

“Why, don’t I look like somebody who’d hijack a truck?”

They were both smiling. Smiles thick with a shared secret.

“Actually my first impression was that you look like you lurked a lot, and also happened to be athletic.” Daphne paused her slow chewing of the cherry, and unabashedly checked out Tammy’s arms. “Who’d have thought,” Daphne went on. “You can probably knock me out for real.”

Tammy was laughing. She was very close, and her lipstick was almost entirely wiped off by the parfait. “You ever did those physical training sessions for a role?”

“Once,” Daphne said, and smiled. “For the scarred drug boss role.”

Tammy’s lips quirked. “Well. Back in Lou's place. Well, _I_ thought you looked like you could choke me breathless for a good few seconds.”

For a heartbeat, Daphne’s breath seemed to have snagged in her throat. But then she swallowed the cherry and tilted her head slightly, eyes never leaving Tammy’s. “You know,” she said lightly, “I probably could. Who knows.”

*

Two days later Daphne waited for Tammy outside the music studio. Then they walked through the damp streets. Daphne liked anonymous neighbourhoods like this, with their clear skylines and reasonably wide tarmac streets. To be unrecognisable and yet to be so close to plenty of people helped her Process. Made her feel more or less alone, but not lonely. Not really.

“I bought my director’s chair in a small shop,” she told Tammy. “Cash. No one knew it was me. It was relaxing.”

It was shrugging off another role. The celebrity role. The Daphne of the billboards, of the glossy magazines, of the arch and vacuous interview answers in front of cameras. The Daphne for the public. Which was, as far as Daphne was concerned, the most that she was willing to share.

“Do you do this often?” asked Tammy.

“Not as much as I’d like to. Mostly between projects.”

“I did that, sort of, after the whole hijacking gig. Coming down from all the adrenaline rush.”

They crossed a street. Above, the sun was a soggy blob between clouds.

After Daphne bought them hot chocolate topped with cream she asked, “Do you miss it?”

Tammy licked a dab of cream from the bow of her lips. Penelope Stern coral today still. She was peering out at the orderly streets and the neat little shops. “Sometimes,” she told Daphne, almost a sigh. “Sometimes.”

Daphne leaned closer and carefully wiped off the rest of the cream. Tammy’s eyes snapped back to her face.

There was almost no trace of lippie left anyway, so Daphne pressed her thumb on her own tongue, sucking it all away.

Tammy’s lips were slightly parted.

Then she pulled away. She stood up. Spoons and saucers clattered. “I should go.”

“Should you?” Daphne said, softly. She remained seated. “Should you.”

Tammy breathed in. Then peered down at Daphne. Tammy looked at her, and looked at her, and she looked at Tammy.

She wondered what Tammy thought of her appearance: her hair undressed and tousled, her reading glasses slightly askew, her white blouse a mesh so fine it revealed her sage green lace bra, her lipstick a matte crimson.

“Daphne,” said Tammy. “I mean, do I really need this? Do I? On top of everything?”

Feather-light, Daphne traced a line on Tammy’s wrist with her pinky finger. “Do you want this?”

Later Tammy would say that this was what tipped her over: this answer of Daphne’s. “Shamelessly self-indulgent,” Tammy would call it, her smile fond. She would tell Daphne that Daphne looked like someone who took and took and took and whatever she gave would be only incidental. And Tammy would admit, “I didn’t know it’s exactly what I need.”

*

What followed were days full of all things good, all things crumbly and dripping with flavour.

Daphne took Tammy out. They dined in a restaurant with ivory tablecloths and elegant shell lamps, Tammy studious with her thick menu and asking the waiter if the vegetables were organic whilst Daphne looked on with amusement. They sat on stools in a smoky bar, shared a small bowl of groundnuts, laughing over their foamy beer as she told Tammy how she auditioned for her first ever role by sweeping into the room already in character in a floor-length swishy skirt and with no other makeup except for an orange lippie. Tammy laughed and laughed and laughed. And she listened. Tammy remembered details that Daphne had mentioned the week before. Then she told Daphne about one hijacking incident, the one where Tammy had banged her hip on a truck door so hard that she had lied to her roommate and said it was a sex bruise. “In retrospect, it sort of was,” Tammy added, sipping her beer. Not too long after, Daphne hurried them to her car, pressed Tammy on the backseat, and sucked the foam from her lips. She was sucking some honey from Tammy’s finger one morning, Tammy snuggled close to her in her car, their clothes rumpled, when Tammy said that Daphne smelled so good. “Coffee and rose and something fruity.” Pleased, Daphne drove them over to the shopping centre in the next town and showed Tammy the bottles of the _**Daphne**_ perfume on display. A musky rosy scent. Tammy examined them with a laugh. She bought one and paid with credit card and signed with her name: Tamsin. She immediately dabbed it behind her right ear, and so it was that side of her neck that Daphne buried her face later on, when they fucked in a dressing room. But Tammy still wore her coral Penelope Stern when Daphne took her to plays, to movies, and to an opera.

“Of course I know you hate her, baby,” Tammy said one day when Daphne took her shopping. She was trying on a white muslin dress whilst Daphne sat on the bench. “Everyone knows you hate her and she hates you. And I love this shade of coral lipstick.”

“I don’t hate her.” Hating some bitch was too much investment. “She just irritates me so much.”

“Is it a work thing?”

“No.” Daphne crossed her legs. She focused on the deep V of the dress on Tammy’s back. Tammy had removed her bra. “Do you like that? It looks amazing on you.”

Tammy smiled over her shoulder. “I love it.”

Sometimes her husband would call, or her kids from the daycare, and Tammy would step away for a bit. Tammy rarely mentioned her husband but Daphne had gathered that they had been aquaintances in high school and their mothers had been long-time friends. With her kids, though, Tammy was warmer. “Have you been good for Mommy? Mommy misses you so much,” she always told her kids. Daphne liked watching Tammy take these calls from a distance; more often than not they gave her a perverse sense of satisfaction.

*

One weekend-away, Tammy said, “Why don’t you come over tomorrow? Have tea.”

They were in Daphne’s place upstate. The sun had just set. Outside the wide glass windows the skyline was twinkling. They were sprawled across the plum-coloured sheets, drowsy and sated. In a corner of the room, pushed against the pale purple wall, the table was busy. Daphne’s laptop was charging beside a pile of stapled papers. Stick-notes formed a line on the wall, just above an amber jar full of pens.

“Come over?” repeated Daphne, stretching. “At your house?”

“You should try this blackberry tea I got. I’ll bake banana bread.”

Daphne considered this. “I thought you don’t know anything about cooking.”

“I don’t. I just know how to bake exactly one kind of bread. Because it’s my favourite.”

Tammy propped her head on her elbow. There was an auburn freckle on the side of her chin, near her jaw. Daphne had seen Tammy’s kid press a kiss on that spot whenever she dropped off Tammy by the daycare. One afternoon when she’d driven with the windows down, she didn’t immediately pull away and so little Thea had seen her.

“Banana bread,” Daphne said, musingly.

“You can watch me bake it.”

They laughed a little.

Daphne looped a lock of Tammy’s hair around her finger. “And what do you tell your kids about me? They’ve seen me a couple of times.”

“I think Thea knows who you are,” Tammy said.

“Did you tell her?”

“No. It’s your secret. But yes, they asked.”

“So am I your special friend?” Daphne smiled. “Mommy’s very special friend?”

“Yes,” Tammy said and ducked down for a quick kiss. “Yes, something like that.”

“Okay. I’ll bring a box of muffins.”

Their lips met again. They tasted each other languidly. Daphne rolled them over, pressed on some of Tammy’s bruises, on collarbones, between her breasts, high on her thighs, enjoying the hitches in Tammy’s breathing. She lightly ran a fingertip along Tammy’s throat where, an hour ago, Daphne’s pink silk scarf had been shortly, carefully, tightened.

Very few women enjoyed sex the way Daphne enjoyed it; she’d struggled to find even a handful. Where had been Tammy all this time? And Tammy seemed to share this sentiment. “It’s like an ache,” she’d told Daphne. “No one has pressed on it just right. Until you.” Not even her husband? Tammy had shaken her head at that question. “Not even him. Not even me. Debbie came close, barely. But you, baby, you do it so right. So good.”

From the pile of clothes on an armchair Tammy’s phone rang. She pressed a final kiss on Daphne before rolling off the bed.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Tammy said, walking over to the window. “Have you been good? Oh, very good. Very good, baby. Mommy will bake you banana bread tomorrow. Would you like that? I knew you would, sweetheart.”

Lolling on the bed, Daphne looked on. She liked listening to these calls. They reminded her that what she had with Tammy were all the parts in a relationship that she cared to bother with: thick layers of cream and fruit, the pulp sucked clean and the rind cast off.

_**fin**_


End file.
